Pinterest: the dos and donâts for brands

Pinterest’s user-created and curated mood boards have helped it become a powerful social network, and its visual focus has helped to popularise the platform for food and drink, retail, fashion, design, beauty and home decor brands.

In March 2013, Pinterest announced that it was introducing web analytics for its platform, allowing brands to track pinning activity from their site and to analyse trends and timeframes. This can only increase its commercial uptake.
According to a February 2013 report from Econsultancy, there are more than 200,000 active Pinterest users in the UK, 29% of whom are in the highest income bracket. The Econsultancy report also highlights the fact that 25% of Fortune Global 100 companies now have Pinterest accounts.

So how can you how harness the power of Pinterest’s visual pinners for your brand?
Pinterest is fuelled by image curation. The screengrabs, infographics, cartoons, and visual inspirational quotes that sometimes make their way to Facebook find a true home with Pinterest, where members are encouraged to pin, organise, share, and sort all the individual visual pieces of internet ephemera to create a collective stream of visual memes.

Pinterest is a little like Tumblr, in that it starts with a photo. But instead of presenting one photo at a time in the Tumblr style, Pinterest photos or “pins” gain context from being sorted by their pinners into “boards” of similar items or concepts for presentation.

Repinning is one of the most social activities on Pinterest and it’s how any user really builds his or her network of followers.
The active members of Pinterest browse, pin, and repin to experience things that are interesting and relevant. But they are also finding things that impact everyday life: crafts projects, planning birthday parties, designing a home on a budget.

So how can this translate in to brand activity?
It’s possible to build a robust following and a sense of community while posting to Pinterest on behalf of a brand, as long as your brand curator participates in a genuine way. Remember, Pinterest is about individual expression and sharing, not about selling or broadcasting.

Pinterest’s Etiquette Guide stresses that self-promotion is frowned upon. Instead, brands are expected to behave as the individual participants of Pinterest do.

Who is using Pinterest?
While in the US, the platform has a female-skewed demographic, in the UK, the gender divide is more male-based. In both countries, consumer-facing and female-centric brands have done well (in the UK, Chanel is the most popular fashion brand), but according to research by visual.ly, the UK audience is also interested in venture capital projects, web and content management, and PR.

There are two main ways social media managers and internal brand advocates can harness Pinterest for brand promotion: by optimising the brand content to appeal to Pinterest participants, and by joining Pinterest as a participant/brand curator.

The first option incorporates the Pinterest aesthetic when creating and publishing visually on the web, but is low-maintenance in terms of social media management.

The second approach of being an active brand curator takes a great deal of energy and a regular flow of content, but has the advantage of using “push button” technology.

Some brands choose not to have a curator, but participate in Pinterest by promoting strong, visual content via traditional social media such as Facebook, Twitter pic, or blog etc. If you have a trusted and savvy brand advocate who is able to recognise and cite your content, this is a practical option.
Active pinners are also savvy web surfers. If you provide beautiful, optimised, and useful content, it is likely to end up on Pinterest.

Optimising content
There are four main ways a product’s image might appear on Pinterest – by screenshot, by direct url, by Pin It bookmarklet, and by Pin It button. If a participant on Pinterest finds your product uncredited via a blogger’s screenshot or by an image search, the trackback to a direct url on an e-commerce or product information site will be lost.

The Pin It Button
The simplest way to prevent this is to incorporate the Pin It button on ecommerce sites, with the Pin It button displayed alongside the product information.

It’s all about the visual
The images themselves are the main allure of pinboards, even though a url might have plenty of text behind it. You need powerful, evocative and emotive images on Pinterest, otherwise a link is unlikely to be repinned. It also helps to be seasonal. That said, don’t forget to include basics, such as pricing info and accurate keywords in your descriptions. Descriptions act as a “title” for an individual pin, so making the description appealing is also important.

Participating on Pinterest as a brand curator
On Pinterest, full, rich content boards do better than sparse ones. For brands, a steady feed of newly pinned or repinned content is better than one mad set-up dash and then a dusty account.

However, do remember to claim your brand address, even if you’re not ready to make your first move on Pinterest. You don’t want to leave it unclaimed and available for brand-jacking.

Show your lifestyle and your brand aesthetic
Getting started on Pinterest can be daunting. Pinterest designer and co-founder Evan Sharp sums it up: “For most consumer brands, the idea behind your brand makes sense on Pinterest.”

Give tutorials
Hobbyists, bakers, crafters, designers, and other “hands-on” people love to use Pinterest as a source book for making visually appealing projects. Brands can tap into this desire by making short tutorials on the use of a product and presenting it either through a simple photo tutorial in pin form, photos and content that give clear how-to instructions (for DIY, recipes, or crafts), or by pinning YouTube videos.

Use it as a focus group
Watch what your followers pin, as well as watching what popular pins in your category or industry reflect about current trends – fashion and retail brands watch for surges in popularity measured by direct engagement (pins and likes) for trends and styles.

Show your core values
For a brand curator, creating different boards on Pinterest can help show the different sides of its personality and your organisation’s core values. You can also align yourself with related or inspiring brands to show that you’re not afraid to showcase content other than your own.

Adrienne Grubb, Head of Marketing, eModeration

This content was based on eModeration’s The Complete Pinterest guide for brands, and the Top 19 Pinterest Tools, written by Bliss Hanlin.